At the end of October DARPA announced it was going to celebrate 40 years of the internet with a competition called the DARPA Network Challenge. On December 5th ten red weather balloons were placed around the U.S. and entrants were tasked with finding them. The reward was $40,000.

At the time we predicted that the competition would be over quite quickly, and it looks like we were right. On the same day as the balloons were put in place a team from MIT, calling themselves the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, managed to find the latitude and longitude of each one and claim the prize. It took them just 9 hours to track all the balloons down.

Even though the contest was a celebration of the internet DARPA also had an alterior motive for such a challenge. It now intends to talk to each of the teams that took part in an attempt to identify whether any of the techniques used could aid military communication and information gathering.

The success of the MIT team seems to be down to the fact they invited anyone and everyone to take part in return for part of the winnings in a form of crowd sourcing . Being first to submit the coordinates of a balloon to the MIT team earned you $2,000, but the person who invited them would also get $1,000, and then $500 for the person who invited them, etc.

Such an offer must have been accepted by thousands of people making the balloon hunt a relatively simple one.

The only way to win this competition was to have a network of people across the U.S. helping. MIT won because they gave the best incentive: cold hard cash. I’m actually surprised it took 9 hours as the number of people this must have attracted would be significant.

I doubt DARPA will learn too much by talking to the teams. Offering cash and a chain of incentives made for a quick turnaround. Can that be applied to military communications?

There may be teams that we haven’t heard about that also managed to submit all the balloon coordinates, but did so later in the day or the day after. If those teams are only a handful in number then DARPA will be more interested to see exactly how they managed to locate the balloons so quickly.